Covid 19

 I will be trying to keep the blog as a diary of sorts to remember this strange time during the spring of 2020.  Strange for our family, strange for the country and strange for the whole world as the pandemic of Covid 19 swept across the world. Soon words like social distancing,  quarantine, stay home to save lives, became part of our everyday vernacular.  

On March 14th, our Mississippi Governor declared a state of emergency for Mississippi and closed schools for the week.  Social distancing was advised, stay six feet away from others and do not gather in groups more than 20 people.  The goal was to help slow the spread of the virus so as to not overwhelm the hospital systems.  This meant all of our extracurricular activities like tennis, choir, bible studies, etc were all cancelled as well.  So all of a sudden we had A LOT of free time on our hands.  I tried to snap pictures of our day to day to help the kids remember what this time in our life was like.

 

The girls made us a restaurant dinner of spaghetti and meat sauce with garlic bread and green beans.  Complete with a menu!  And they cleaned up, yay! 

Lots more time for board games.

This first week, the marina was still open and we were able to take boat rides.  We took A LOT of boat rides because we had a feeling it would not be long until the marinas were closed (we were right).

Addison is always writing...even on boat rides.  In the above picture she is working on her comic book series which is up to 80 pages now.  

I'm always happy on the water with my babies.

Thankfully we had a lot of beaches where we could socially distance ourselves so we spent a lot of time on the beach that first week.  

They resorted back to being little kids and made sand castle villages.

We even headed out to Horn Island and enjoyed a COMPLETELY solitary day on the island, not another soul or boat in sight.  It was glorious.  

We soaked up as much as we could of the island, knowing in our heart this would be off limits soon as well.  

Throughout this first week, Stephen worked his normal shifts at the ER while also having a gazillion phone meetings and emails to try to determine how to best prepare our hospital systems for the worst case scenarios.   Part of the very real situation for all hospital systems was lack of protective gear for the healthcare  workers.  We knew there would not be enough masks, gowns, goggles for the duration of the fight against Covid.  This was very scary knowing how exposed Stephen would be to Covid patient, after Covid patient.  We had a friend step up make him homemade masks to wear over his N95 mask which he would be re-wearing for multiple days because of limited supply.  The above picture is fabric I cut up to use for masks from Stephen's old scrubs.  The bottom is my friend's first attempt at a mask, she has now streamlined her product and they look awesome!  This was before the whole wave of churches and citizens making homemade masks became the norm.